The video design, by Alex Koch, plays the major supporting role. The most striking moment integrates imagery and action: Ms. Cheek hunches before an image of Theresa’s bed, poetically suggesting a woman shrunk to the size of a stuffed animal on her pillow, as her sister tries to cheer her up.

Other video sequences — montages of dance floors and bar crawls, and the culminating re-creation of Theresa’s murder — subvert the period ambience of the music to suggest that today’s casual hookup scene shares the same dangerous undertow that the bar scene of the 1970s did.

In the helmers’ most stylized move, Lear’s life is presented as a theater dressed with overlapping television screens; his 9-year-old self (played by Keaton Nigel Cooke) wanders this live collage of past, future and present, while the real-life Lear — still tack-sharp at 93 — looks on. Iridescently shot by Noah Baumbach’s current d.p. Sam Levy, with a lovely, skittering free-jazz score by Kris Bowers, these sequences seem more than coincidentally reminiscent of Alejandro G. Inarritu’s anatomy-of-an-actor “Birdman.” 

You are constantly encouraged to look into the shadows at the side of Troy Hourie’s endlessly fascinating setting and discover who is watching whom. Along with tantalizing light and projections from John Culbert and Alex Koch that play out America’s racial ferment — luminous intensity alternates with confounding shadows —

Alex Basco Koch

Design and directing for projections, video installations and films.

Alex Koch designs and directs theatrical projections, video installations, and films. In ten years based out of New York, Koch has designed projections for well over one hundred plays, musicals, and immersive art events